Is Apple Ever Going To Update Itunes Ui

Apple knows that the iTunes interface is extremely confusing and needs work. Just plain its solution is to add even more menus.

Apple released an update to iTunes today that's supposed to give it "a simpler pattern," supposedly making it easier to navigate betwixt sections to detect what you're looking for. To practise that, information technology brings back an one-time iTunes standby: the lefthand navigation bar, which disappeared a while back.

Peachy, another carte du jour

The lefthand bar gives quick access to specific views within each section. If you're looking at your music library, for instance, the lefthand bar will let you sort by creative person or albums and present the unlike playlists yous've fabricated. It's definitely easier than searching for those items in drop-downward menus, like you had to before.

But the update doesn't address the core event with iTunes' navigation, and perhaps fifty-fifty makes it worse: it'due south yet weirdly difficult to find the department y'all're looking for — as in, your music library, your video library, or the App Store.

Here's how it worked before:

Exercise you encounter those little icons on the left? You had to click between them to modify what type of content you're looking at. A whole agglomeration of stuff is hidden underneath the "..." too, including podcasts, apps, and audiobooks. Say you desire to get to the App Store using this layout. Yous might think you could just click on iTunes Shop and then observe the app section; you'd be wrong! Yous have to click on the "..." carte du jour, and so select apps, and so select the Store option in the middle of the navigation bar.

Here's how information technology works now:

It's pretty much identical, except instead of displaying 3 icons and a "..." menu, every section is subconscious within of a drop-down card. Perchance it's amend because you can actually read the proper noun of the section you're on, which is a much clearer indicator of how you'd move elsewhere. But if you're like me, and forget how this works every time you open up iTunes, you now have another navigation bar to scan through while figuring out how to get effectually.

The key improvement here is the removal of the drop-down menu on the righthand side of the screen, which previously held all of the options that are now exposed in the lefthand card. That's a real help, simply the lefthand menu doesn't take over everything. You'll still take to search through those peak tabs to notice major features, similar Apple tree Music and the App Store. (There is, by the style, no 1 tab that says "Apple Music" — it's actually a combination of the For You, New, Radio, and Connect tabs.)

I have a proposal for Apple for how information technology can ready this. I'm not saying information technology would set all of iTunes' problems — I'g not even going to fence that it would be a slap-up solution — but it's a quick fix that would dramatically simplify the interface we're looking at today:

itunes 7 lefthand bar-news-urban guru cafe

Image credit: Urban Guru Cafe.

Yeah, that's iTunes from ten years agone, with a more than sensible lefthand bar. It'south non beautiful, but at to the lowest degree I knew how to notice the App Store.